Cost of living and the great pain game

Cost of living is a favourite topic for some, and petrol plays a big part of that.

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That the cost of living is out of control is held by the voting public as a law of nature, and when all treatment for hip pocket pain fail there's only one thing to do: complain. Peter Lewis and Jackie Woods write.

Anyone who has lived with back or neck pain knows how it becomes the defining story of their lives; no matter what the external environment, the inner pain is pervasive.

This week's Essential Report suggests that despite historically low levels of inflation, the nation is suffering from a similar selective ailment, a chronically inflamed hip pocket nerve.

Cost of living has become a hot button issue in Australian politics, the term often muttered with a sense of grave injustice that living should come with any financial impost at all.

That the cost of living is out of control is held by the voting public as a law of nature - like gravity or lying politicians.

The current modest inflation rate of 2.7 per cent may suggest that living costs aren't running rampant, but if people are feeling impossibly stretched it's hard to argue with that.

To paraphrase former NSW premier Nathan Rees's poetic musings about traffic: It's like being in love. If you think you are in love, you are in love. If you think you are under cost of living pressure, you are under cost of living pressure.

This week's Essential Report shows many of us perceive that we're paying a lot more for the basics of life than we were a couple of years ago:

*The survey was conducted online from March 7 to 10, 2014 and is based on 1039 respondents.

Phantom or real, the tricky question for politicians is how to treat the pain emanating from the hip pocket: fuss and indulge? Or dust off and instruct to HTFU.

Oppositions tend to favour fanning our hypochondria, branding any attempt by government to raise revenue from or wind back welfare payments as a grotesque assault on the walking wounded.

This leads to remarkable phenomena like the $150,000-a-year battlers who emerged from hiding after Labor moved to freeze indexation of family payments.

Tony Abbott prosecuted a highly successful campaign against the carbon tax by convincing an aggrieved hip pocket-focused electorate that cost of living was a bigger threat than climate change.

But the ailment that can prove an opposition's friend is harder to manage in government, where there are election promises to fund and budgets to aspire to balance one day. So we see the Coalition transition its deep concern about cost of living to our supposed culture of entitlement instead. HTFU.

Over the years we have seen politicians attempt to address our collective hip pocket nerve inflammation with many different treatment plans.

There are those who advocate massage around the muscle areas in an attempt to settle things down, arguing cost of living anxiety is really a function of job and income security. When life is precarious things seem more expensive and costs unmanageable. On this logic our nerve ends are more exposed than usual.

Others focus on the structure, arguing that the rise and fall of interest rates can tweak the pain. But using monetary policy is now seen as a blight on the broader national health and Treasurer Joe Hockey seems more interested in starving out the pain through cuts to government spending.

Then there are those on the fringes, with their alternate medicines, needles and potions. Kevin Rudd believed that Fuel Watch and Grocery Choice websites would empower the patient to self-manage, but that transparency hocus pocus was no match for the severity of the condition.

Attempts at serious tax debate - whether of the carbon, mining or consumption varieties - are like aversion therapy, as we are told that the long-term strength of our body politic is not worth the short-term pain of improving our posture.

But perhaps the key to hip pocket nerve treatment is that in order to improve, the patient must want to get better and have hope for the future.

On this front, we're not doing well. When Essential asked a few weeks ago how voters thought cost of living would travel under the Abbott Government, 52 per cent said it would get worse compared to just 17 per cent who thought it would get better.

As any sufferer of back pain will tell you, when all the treatments have failed there is only one remaining solution - soldier on, find some quality medication and complain to anyone who will listen.

Peter Lewis is a director of Essential Media Communications. View his full profile here. Jackie Woods is a communications consultant at Essential Media Communications. View her full profile here.